By Vladimir In Boris Yeltsin's twilight year, his confused and demoralized country is gearing up for another war. Shadowy terrorists stalk Moscow, exploding bombs among high-rise settlements of sleeping families. Paranoid and jumpy policemen are everywhere on the lookout, smelling potential mayhem in the most innocently parked car.
With 300 people killed by random bomb blasts in September, Moscow is taking no chances. President Yeltsin, by contrast, appears to be set on another of his reckless and costly gambles-war in the Caucasus.
As Russia marshals the troops for a ground invasion of Chechnya, it is worth pausing to consider the history of Russian involvement in the Caucasus.
Russian interest in the region began early. In AD 943 Varangian, or Russified Norse, adventurers had sailed down the Caspian from the Volga River and captured the fortress of Barda. Subsequently, certain marriage alliances were concluded between the Russian and Georgian royal families, and in the 17th century Caucasian rulers were on several occasions forced to ask for Russian help against their enemies.
Peter I the Great was the first to take advantage of the opportunities thus afforded to take possession of Caucasian territory. He occupied Derbent in 1722 and Baku in the following year. In 1770 Russian troops for the first time crossed the Caucasus range and took possession of Kutaisi. By 1785 all of the northern region of the Caucasus was designated as a Russian province; and Georgia was absorbed in the next century.
Two large groups of tribes in the middle Caucasus then acknowledged their subjection to the Russians, the Ossetes in 1802 and the Lezgians in 1803. Mingrelia fell in 1804 and the kingdom of Imereti in 1810. By the treaty of Gulistan in 1813, Persia ceded to Russia a wide area of the khanates of the eastern Caucasus, from Lankaran northward to Derbent. Russia had little difficulty in acquiring by conquest from Persia in 1828 a stretch of the northern Armenian plateau, including the entire plain of Yerevan, and was able to take over more territory in the same area from Turkey in the following year.
The resistance of the mountain tribes, particularly of the Circassians of Abkhazia and the Lezgians of Dagestan, was more fierce and protracted. During 30 years, from 1815 to 1845, the Russians could do little more than hold these mountain peoples at bay. Some were sustained by patriotic feelings, others by religious fervor.
The Circassians of the Western Caucasus were largely quelled between 1832 and 1839, but farther east in Dagestan resistance by the Muslim tribes was carried on longer.
A holy war was declared by the sheikh Kasi Mullah (Ghazi Muhammad), and, after he was killed by the Russians, the struggle was continued by his successor Shamil.
The son of a free landlord, Shamil studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, and Arabic, acquired prestige as a learned man, and in 1830 joined the Muridis, a Sufi (Islamic mystical) brotherhood. Under the leadership of Ghazi Muhammad, the brotherhood had become involved in a holy war against the Russians, who had formally acquired control of Dagestan from Iran in 1813. After Ghazi Muhammad was killed by the Russians (1832) and his successor, Gamzat Bek, was assassinated by his own followers (1834), Shamil was elected to serve as the third imam (political-religious leader) of Dagestan.
Establishing an independent state in Dagestan (1834), Shamil reorganized and enlarged his Chechen and Dagestan forces and led them in extensive raids against the Russian positions in the Caucasus region. The Russians sent a fresh expedition against Shamil in 1838; although it captured Ahulgo, the mountaineers' main stronghold, Shamil escaped. Neither that nor subsequent expeditions were able to defeat Shamil, despite their successful penetration into his territory and their conquests of his forts and towns.
In 1857 the Russians determined to suppress Shamil, whose reputation had spread throughout western Europe and whose exploits had become legendary among his own people. Sending large, well-equipped forces under generals N.I. Yevdokimov and A. I. Baryatinsky, they started operations from all sides; their military successes, coupled with the increasing exhaustion of Shamil's followers, resulted in the surrender of many villages and tribes to the Russians.
After the invaders successfully stormed Shamil's fortress at Vedeno (April 1859), he and several hundred of his adherents withdrew to Mount Gunib. On Aug. 25 (Sept. 6, New Style), 1859, Shamil, recognizing the futility of continuing to fight the overwhelming Russian armies that surrounded him, finally surrendered and effectively ended the resistance of the Caucasian peoples to Russian subjugation. Shamil was taken to St. Petersburg and then was exiled to Kaluga, south of Moscow. With permission from the Russian czar, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1870.
Dagestan was completely pacified by 1864, after which almost the entire Circassian nation, numbering perhaps 400,000, preferring exile to subjection, emigrated into Ottoman territory, leaving the Western Caucasus empty and desolated.
The Terek River remained a defensive frontier until the 1860s. The constant skirmishes of Chechens and Russians along the Terek form the background to Leo Tolstoy's novel The Cossacks.
As is the case today the origins of the conflict had nothing to do with religion. Russia in the 19th century was both a multilingual and a multireligious empire. Only about half the population were at the same time Russian by language and Orthodox by religion.
The Orthodox were to some extent privileged in comparison with the other Christians; all Christians enjoyed a higher status than Muslims; and the latter were not so disadvantaged as the Jews.
The basis of legitimacy was obedience to the czar: Nicholas expected all his subjects to obey him, but he did not expect non-Russians to become Russians. The idea that Russians, as such, should have a status superior to that of other peoples of the empire was distasteful to Nicholas. Admittedly, he detested the Poles, but that was only because they had been disloyal subjects and revolted against him.
The final solution?
Mr Yeltsin almost faced impeachment proceedings earlier this year for, inter alia, fighting and losing the 1994-96 Chechen war. Now he appears on the brink of refighting that bungled conflict.
Back in 1996, only the fragile peace brokered by Alexander Lebed saved Mr Yeltsin's skin. As now the president appears to be trying to turn history on its head, hoping to shore up his and his clique's power with another military adventure, few people seem pause to consider the national trauma that was Mr Yeltsin's first Chechen war.
Around 80-100,000 were killed, including thousands of children and many Russians, as a ramshackle but ruthless Russian military visited indiscriminate destruction from the air and from heavy field artillery on the breakaway region.
The Chechen capital, Grozny was razed, bombed to smithereens, and then left to rot for the past three years, a breeding ground for the angry young men of the Islamist insurgency who currently have the Russian top brass, "patriotic" newspaper columnists, and the "anti-terrorist" experts of the security services reduced to voicing incoherent rage as an apology for the lack of a discernible strategy or policy.
Yet, the differences between 1996 and 1999 are many. The earlier Chechen conflict was hugely unpopular and sparked anti-war demonstrations across Russia, but public opinion is currently supportive, mainly because of the wave of terror bombs in Moscow and elsewhere which have killed 300 and maimed many more.
A recent poll found 49 percent support for a campaign of air strikes against Chechnya. Politicians of all stripes, including those who wanted to impeach Mr Yeltsin for the earlier war, have been banging the martial drums, and there is broad unquestioning faith in the authorities' assertions that Chechen terrorists are responsible for the bombs, although no conclusive evidence has been presented to back that contention.
The best-selling Moscow tabloid newspaper, Moskovsky Komsomolets, has also proposed drastic violence against Chechnya, using its front page to urge the military to deploy chemical weapons and napalm "to physically destroy the entire republic."
Such stridency at the levels of the Moscow elite reflect current popular support for the military crackdown. This is the key difference between 96 and 99. The earlier two-year war, intended as a demonstration of Russia's lingering Great Power status, and of military efficacy, backfired drastically as a shambolic confirmation of Moscow's weakness and flailing cruelty.
The military hard-liner, Colonel-General Leonid Ivashev, the head of the defense ministry's diplomatic department and the official who most vocally opposed Russian engagement alongside NATO in Kosovo this summer, has been calling for "a final solution" in Chechnya. He has not spelled out what such an echo of the Nazis would entail.
The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin once wrote with bitterness that "the only European in Russia is the government."
How symbolic that it was left to Russia"s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, to remind the public-after weeks of an anti-Caucasian hysteria in the press-that "Russia cannot confuse the bandits who are operating on the territory of Chechnya with the Chechen people, who are also their victims."
Russia's struggle for control
1722: Peter the Great annexes the Caspian Sea regions of Dagestan, starting a 150-year campaign to bring the North Caucasus region into Russian Empire.
Mid-19th century: Imam Shamil, seeking to establish a theocratic state, uses Islam to build the mountain tribes of Dagestan and Chechnya as a fighting force.
1917: The Russian revolution brings Communists to power, but Islam and traditional clan system remain strong in the North Caucasus despite persecution.
1944: Josef Stalin deports the entire Chechen people and their neighbors, the Ingush, to Central Asia for "collaboration" with the Nazis. Tens of thousands die.
1957: Nikita Khrushchev allows the Chechens back to the Caucasus, setting up the Checheno-Ingush republic.
Oct 1991: After the overthrow of local Communist ruler Doku Zavgayev, Soviet air force general Dzhokhar Dudayev wins a disputed local poll and declares Chechnya independent.
Dec 1994: President Boris Yeltsin sends troops to Chechnya to crush the independence movement. Rebels are driven to the mountains but are not defeated.
Aug 1996: Rebels seize the Chechen capital Grozny. Moscow signs a truce and the Russians agree to pull out.
May 1997: A peace accord is signed. Chechnya's final status remains unresolved.
August 1999: The latest conflict was sparked by seizures of border villages by Islamic militants backed by a maverick Chechen field commander, Shamil Basayev. Moscow bombs that killed more than 300 were attributed to Chechen-backed militants.
The men behind the unholy war
Although Chechens are traditionally Sufis, Wahabism, a far more radical form of Sunni Islam, was introduced by Muslim fighters who came to join the cause from abroad and has strengthened in the past year.
Wahabism is now the religious banner behind which opposition is organized against President Aslan Maskhadov, the former leader of the Chechen forces in the war of independence, who has attempted to steer a moderate course in rebuilding his devastated country. Wahabites accuse Maskhadov of pandering to the West. They advocate a Chechnya on the lines of Taliban-led Afghanistan.
Maskhadov faces opposition from two warlords. One of them, Shamil Basayev, gained cult status after leading a daring raid on a hospital in southern Russia in July 1995, at the height of the Chechen war, when he seized 1,200 hostages and humiliated the Russian special forces.
Alongside him is Khattab, an Arab militant famed for a devastating mountain ambush he executed against a Russian military convoy in Chechnya in 1996. He takes no prisoners: more than 100 soldiers were killed, and video tapes of the attack were later sold in the markets of Grozny, the Chechen capital.
Known as the "Black Arab", Khattab is widely suspected of having links with Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi dissident financier blamed for last year's bombings of American embassies in Africa. Russian intelligence sources suspect the hand of Bin Laden in the Dagestani rebel campaign and believe he may have helped to fund secret terrorist training camps in Chechnya.
Salman Raduyev, another young warrior, led a second hostage raid in Russian territory in Dagestan in January, 1996, where he vanished under shell fire but reappeared months later, radically different in appearance, saying he had undergone plastic surgery.
